Not the Moon...

...or a Moon Lake but the San Luis Reservoir in central California, southeast of San Jose and way north of the L.A. basin.






This almost treeless environment in the searing heat challenges your eyes. It is difficult to look at; its austere beauty seems surreal.









This state is like that; it has so many places unlike anywhere else on the continent.









Some of them are familiar from Hollywood movies, so they resemble sets more than any type of real life place.









Others, like the San Luis, just make you feel as if you have stumbled into outer space somehow.












Days later, as you look over your photos, you still can't quite believe what you've seen.












It's just too strange and strangely lovely.

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GOP DimWit Hopes to Destroy American Families

PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE

My ongoing attempts to keep my family insured were dealt another setback yesterday when the company (Predictify) that laid me off last January folded its operations. Thus, five months' work to obtain coverage under Cal-Cobra came to naught. We no longer qualify.

In this context, the comments of Republican Senator Jim DeMint about President Barack Obama's attempts to reform our dysfunctional health care system literally sickened me. This is what DimWit had to say:"If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

You know, DimWit, you and your ilk are what's broken in this country. You have nothing constructive to offer the national debate that is occurring over how to reform such a broken, wasteful, illogical system. But that is no surprise because all you and your kind care about is the game of politics -- attack politics at that.

You clearly not only lack a functional brain, you have an empty spot where your heart should be. You are therefore public enemy No. 1 of my family and families all across this land. I now favor a national health plan that covers everyone in the country except Jim DeMint and his family.

May they end up roaming the streets endlessly, begging for care, but receiving only the scorn of Hell they so richly deserve.

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California Roadtrip Album

Tomatoes


Sunset


Skyline


Onions


San Gabriel Mountains


L.A.


I-5


CalTech campus


Pasadena


Santa Monica Beach


Pyramid Lake

The Home of Knowledge

Pasadena, CA.



Here at the California Institute of Technology, one of the top universities in the world, the list of Nobel laureates is long (over 30); even longer is the list of scientific discoveries that have benefited humankind.

Roughly eighty years ago, for example, a team led by Thomas Hunt Morgan, the most distinguished biologist in the United States of his time, discovered the role of genes and chromosomes in heredity.

This is also where the different roles played by the two hemispheres of the brain were determined.

It is a small campus. There are roughly 900 undergraduates and 1200 graduate students here, and they are all extremely bright. The entering students have consistently higher average test scores (on the SAT 1 and 2) than any other university or college in the U.S.



My son Peter is doing his Phd here, researching the behavior of Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly.



Here's a whiteboard where he presented a series of algebraic calculations to a group of visiting students last Friday.

You may recall that Sarah Palin made fun of this kind of research during last year's campaign. Of course, Palin is well-known for having a brain smaller than a fruit fly's, which is why she didn't know that, according to the National Institutes of Health, "The tiny insects, which bear little resemblance to people, nevertheless share much of our genetic heritage. Fruit flies possess strikingly similar versions of the genes that promote normal human development and, when altered, contribute to disease."



We toured the lab where Peter works today, and saw the cooler where flies are cultivated.



They are subjected to a type of virtual reality that allows Peter and the other researchers to monitor their behavior under ever-changing conditions that simulate their real-world environments.



Seen up close in enlarged photos, these red-eyed creatures seem strangely familiar -- not unlike what science fiction film-makers often imagine aliens from outer space to look like.

Of course, if life has evolved elsewhere, it probably is made of the same building blocks as we are, and therefore could easily look like fruit flies.

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Kindness of Strangers

My friend called me in distress; she was stranded with a flat tire in a rural part of the peninsula. I left a business lunch in Palo Alto to head north to help her, but the traffic was awful, and it took much longer than it should have to get there.

By the time I did, two young guys had stopped and changed the tire for her. "Neither of us had ever changed a tire before," one told me.

"Thank you, thank you," she kept saying, reverting to her Japanese upbringing by bowing as well.

"These angels have helped me,"she said.

The boys went on their way, riding bicycles near the Crystal Springs Reservoir. As we bid them ado, I gave her a hug. I felt wetness on her cheek.

It's hard to fathom the courage it takes for a single person in her mid-40s to leave Japan with all of its deep-rooted cultural restrictions and expectations, its "culture of dependence," and immigrate to the U.S.

Everything seems the opposite of what she knew in the past. Much of the time, cultural misunderstandings and language barriers confine her attempts to assimilate to confusing sidesteps and unpleasant encounters.

But then events like the flat tire enable her to experience the kindness of strangers that is one key element of American culture at its very best. It's enough to make her shed tears of gratitude.

And for me to be proud of my people.

-30-

Pre-Digital History Washes Away in Flood

My return home from the desert was not stress-free. Somehow I managed to lose two credit cards, after some 20 years of never having lost anything of value -- with the costly exception of several relationships. I'd even memorized those 16-digit account numbers!

Any sequence of numbers eventually becomes like an old friend. But after searching my luggage, and checking with the resort, I concluded that they had vaporized or had been hijacked by aliens, so I canceled both accounts.

Out with the old; in with the new. Change is good. I'll just get cozy with two new 16-digit sequences.

At the house, the carpet in my laundry room was saturated with water. Turned out an ancient cast-iron pipe had fractured in an inside-out, rust-driven, jagged line north to south.

Rich came over today, cut the pipe high and low, and mounted a new PVC "band-aid" and tightened it over the remaining cast-iron original sections. Good as new, at least for now.

Anyway, the point of this story is that many of my old magazine stories and clippings were in cardboard boxes in that laundry room, along with various tax records, journals, and letters. Some of them were ruined beyond repair. As I tossed them into the garbage, I figured this is a good thing.

There is a major dilemma for those of us pack-rats whose lives and careers span the decades before the Internet era and today's world. Now, every bit of information is digital and theoretically able to be saved indefinitely -- or at least as long as the servers hosting this content remain viable.

What to do with all the old stories? They need to be scanned and digitized. The paper versions are rotting away anyway. I doubt anyone will ever want to sort through my old articles. There are literally hundreds of them, barely if at all indexed or even listed anywhere I'm aware of.

I can't help wishing I had a library intern volunteer, or somebody like that, who could scan in all of this stuff before it disappears form history. The flooding of my laundry room woke me up to the fact that being a pack-rat is not a wise strategy going forward.

-30-

Desert Images

These grainy photos, I hope, speak for themselves. They were shot over the past few days outside of Tucson. We saw bunnies, coyotes, deer, and road-runners.

Who the hell would have imagined road-runners outside of an animated cartoon? It turns out they live in the southwestern U.S. and Mexico and a bit into Central America. I've simply led too sheltered a life to have known that -- until now.

I did not actually see one myself but one of my colleagues did, in fact he saw three. Apparently they can grow to two feet in height, and although they are capable of flight, they usually act much as they do in cartoons, simply outrunning any predators who show up in the open desert air.

Anyone who has ever watched a cowboy movie (which is everyone alive on earth by now, except perhaps the pathetic victims of North Korea's absurd dictatorship), would instantly recognize the scenes of the countryside where I have been since the middle of last week.

Movie studios in fact share a facility near here from which to shoot their flicks. Perception. Reality. This is the background for so many fantasies.

But the cacti don't know, the coyotes don't know, the road-runners are clueless. Only you and I, fellow humans, know how we have used their ecological niche as a set. I wonder whether the creatures who survive the coming global climate calamity will get a hold of the images we leave behind?

Somehow it comforts me to imagine an audience of road-runners, pausing for a moment at an outdoor theater, as a desert butterfly pushes the button, releasing the soundtrack and the moving image on the big screen -- yes, the show must go on.

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